Digital Commons Network^™

Editorial: How Women Are Reclaiming Their Power In The Podcast Sphere, Siobhán Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

This issue considers intimate stories, mostly by women - particularly germane in this era of #MeToo.

Mothers And Daughters In The Digital Private Era: Review Of “A Life Sentence: Victims, Offenders, Justice And My Mother” By Samantha Broun And Jay Allison And “Mariya” By Mariya Karimjee, Kaitlin Prest, And Mitra Kaboli., Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita

RadioDoc Review

The conditions of contemporary soundwork have sparked an extraordinary flowering of intimate storytelling, much of it told by women. Freed from the bonds of technology, scale, and forms of support and distribution that keep traditional radio relentlessly mainstream, the new “digital privacy” of the last fifteen years has allowed new kinds of stories to be told: or rather, has allowed some of the oldest stories in the world to finally be spoken aloud. In both “Mariya” and “A Life Sentence” sexual violence against women is portrayed in all its complexity, tragedy, and terrible familiarity.

In “A Life Sentence,” Samantha Broun …

Bowraville And Phoebe's Fall: Award-Winning Australian Podcasts From The Media Formerly Known As Print, Wendy Carlisle

RadioDoc Review

Digital technology has democratised the audio storytelling space in a quite profound way. This article compares two major podcast investigations produced by established Australian newspaper mastheads: Bowraville by The Australian, and Phoebe’s Fall by The Age. Bowraville examines the unsolved murders of three Aboriginal children in the 1990s – all of whom came from the same small town. Phoebe’s Fall investigates the bizarre death in a garbage chute of a luxury Melbourne apartment building of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk and her troubled relationship with her much older boyfriend.

In depicting what have been described as the three essential ingredients of …

La Revolte Des Prostituées/The Sex Workers Revolt: A Dual Analysis, Sean Prpick, Maud Beaulieu

RadioDoc Review

This documentary chronicles how hundreds of French sex workers went on strike in 1975 and occupied five Catholic churches to protest against police abuse and government closure of their workplace. Forty years on, Australian producer, academic and sex worker rights researcher Eurydice Aroney revisits the Lyon cathedral occupied by the women with the full blessing of its cleric, Père Blanc, now ninety years old. Interviews with Blanc and some of the original sex worker protesters are interwoven with archival material to make a compelling audio story, selected as a finalist for the UK In The Dark award (2015).

This work …

‘Swansong’ And ‘ Losing Yourself’: Meditations On Life, Death And The Liminal, Cristal Duhaime

RadioDoc Review

This article considers two very personal audio documentaries that reflect on love and identity via the liminal space between life and death. Swansong, by award-winning UK radio producer Hana Walker-Brown, is set in a hospital, as Hana and her father bear witness to her grandmother’s dying and celebrate her joyful life. Losing Yourself, by US producer Ibby Caputo, is a revelatory account of dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

Swansong is a picture of a person fondly remembered but Hana elevates it beyond eulogy into a multi-layered meditation. Her grandmother Joan’s voice flutters in and out of ethereal recreations of …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Greek Tragedy In China, Sonya Song

RadioDoc Review

Following the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has rendered himself the omnipotent ruler of one fifth of the world’s population. Xi has defeated his political rivals with no mercy; among them was a rising political star, Bo Xilai, who was shot down in 2012 and is now in prison. Bo has been nearly forgotten – until early this year when his dramatic life and political battle were revived by Carrie Gracie with her brilliant BBC podcast series, Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

Although as a Chinese native I followed …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Chinese House Of Cards Meets Agatha Christie., Drew Ambrose

RadioDoc Review

Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel is a podcast that is Agatha Christie meets House of Cards with an Oriental twist. It tells the story of the downfall of Bo Xilai, a once powerful and charismatic politician, who could have eclipsed current President Xi Jingping as a future leader of China if the cards fell his way. Despite the challenges of reporting in China, BBC China Editor Carrie Gracie is able to explain with clarity the tale of money, sex and power than unravelled Bo Xilai.

Gracie guides us through her five-part series with clear knowledge of her beat …

Editorial: Podcasting As The New Space For Crafted Audio, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial Overview

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part Two, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part One, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

Empathy, Ethics And Aesthetics In Love + Radio, Michelle Macklem

RadioDoc Review

The podcast Love + Radio thrives on cultivating a kind of emotional tightrope, where the listener wavers from curiosity to contempt to empathy. The episodes “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” have stark differences, particularly in terms of sound design, but their aesthetic and production values have a coherency that is exemplary of Love + Radio’s style. Sound is used to distinguish between ‘Ellen’, the subject, and ‘Jack’ her paedo-baiting alter ego. ‘Jack’ is created by pitch-shifting the voice of ‘Ellen’ down, instantly giving the story intrigue and also alluding to the clandestine nature of their work. “Jack and …

Criminal: Journalistic Rigour, Gothic Tales And Philosophical Heft, Jason Loviglio

RadioDoc Review

Like many of the shows in PRX’s Radiotopia catalogue of podcasts, Criminal’s sensibility and sound partake of the US public radio formula made famous by This American Life: journalistic rigour and gothic yarns. The show tells “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or got caught somewhere in the middle”. But it’s moved beyond mere crime journalism to something that aspires to a bit more philosophical heft. Most of the stories unspool through the elegant co-narration between host Phoebe Judge and each episode’s central protagonist. The effect is almost always seamless, thanks to the expert mixing of …

The Eternal Present: The Untold And Short Cuts Series, Bbc Radio 4., Lyn Gallacher

RadioDoc Review

The present tense is THE powerful first lesson in radio grammar. But so is telling the truth. What happens then, when these two butt up against one another and call each other’s bluff?

‘The Untold’ is a half-hour BBC radio series dedicated to ‘documenting the untold dramas of 21^st century Britain’. The episode, Songs of the Bothy Balladeer, like all the stories in this series, is personal. This whole production can only be made with a high degree of cooperation from all its subjects. Indeed some of them nominate themselves. It means that we, the audience, are …

Mei Mei, A Daughter's Song: Review, Masako Fukui

RadioDoc Review

The most compelling aspect of Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song is its enduring power as cultural critique. On the surface, the subject matter is the universal conflict between mother and daughter, but this radio docudrama by Taiwanese-American producer Dmae Roberts is in fact an ambitious exploration of the complex meanings of race, hybridity and cultural ‘mixedness’ that outline the contours of identity in multicultural societies such as the US.

As an Asian-American ‘minority’ discourse, this documentary disrupts the dominant ‘white vs other’ understanding of culture by exploring Roberts’ ambivalence about her own biracial identity (her mother is Taiwanese, her father …

Editorial, Radiodoc Review, Volume Two, Issue Two, 2016, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Overview of articles reviewed in fourth issue of RadioDoc Review

Balancing Personal Trauma, Storytelling And Journalistic Ethics: A Critical Analysis Of Kirsti Melville's The Storm, Mia Lindgren

RadioDoc Review

When Kirsti Melville’s documentary The Storm about the life-long impact of child sexual abuse was broadcast in 2014, it contributed to a public debate about sexual abuse. Hundreds of listeners commented on the ABC Radio National website and Facebook pages, expressing how deeply moved they were, praising both the subject of the story Erik and the journalist Kirsti for their bravery and honesty in making the documentary, and remarked that Erik’s personal story helped them understand the issue better. Kirsti Melville won three national awards for her program, which also documented her personal story as Erik’s former partner.

This critique …

From The Limbo Zone Of Transmissions: Gregory Whitehead’S "On The Shore Dimly Seen", Virginia Madsen

RadioDoc Review

In this review-essay, Virginia Madsen enters the polyphonous 'limbo zone of transmissions' created by Gregory Whitehead's most recent 'performed documentary' and radio provocation, "On the shore dimly seen". This composed voicing, drawn from verbatim texts courtesy of WikiLeaks and the dysfunctionality of America's Guantanamo Bay, is heard as a fortuitous chance encounter with a medium – and as an increasingly rare listening 'detour' while Madsen is on the road. This essay is thus both a reflection upon the nature of the radio offered here, the chance listening experience to work of this kind, and upon the distinctive body of work …

On The Shore Dimly Seen: Review, Götz Naleppa

RadioDoc Review

A new wave of understanding and agreement with all sorts of secret service methods which pretend to protect us against terrorism makes Whitehead’s radio performance, On The Shore Dimly Seen, even more precious and important than at the time of its production. Because it is the voice of a radical believer in democracy and human rights: today a lonely voice in the chorus of fear. We hear Gregory Whitehead’s voice chanting the interrogation log of Guantanamo Bay detainee 063 (prisoners in Guantanamo do not have names, they are only numbers), interwoven with the voices of vocalist Gelsey Bell and …

The Hacker Syndrome: Review, Martin Johnson

RadioDoc Review

The Hacker Syndrome tells the story of Stephan Ubach, a man who is slowly revealed as an activist and a hero to those involved in the Arab Spring. A man who, as the story unfolds, forgets his own needs - and breaks down. This is also a story of distance - physical and mental. A story of the importance that information plays in people’s lives and how some people are willing to risk their lives for the world to know what is going on. Radio documentaries and features usually require an emotional attachment to the character, while computers, and often …

A Kiss - Review, Miyuki Jokiranta

RadioDoc Review

A Kiss is a quick six-minute dip in the shared psyche of Kaitlin and her former lover, Kyle, who after three years of being separated, now find themselves in Kaitlin’s bedroom on a sun-drenched afternoon, in the air a question - will they kiss? Kaitlin’s work chooses microcosmic worlds to enlarge to a point where each thought, each intention, even each stage of an action is given the time to unfold, offering up intimate portraits of character. Paradoxically, greater insight comes from the momentary than something attempting to be more exhaustive. Such a brief account precludes detailed explanation but creates …

Senza Parole: A Review, Robyn Ravlich

RadioDoc Review

This is a charming radio feature of modest length in the form of a travel memoir. Its author-producer is Katharina Smets, a radio maker with a background in philosophy, theatre and philology with experience in teaching radio documentary at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium and as a reporter and feature maker for Radio 1, KLARA (VRT in Belgium) and Holland Doc Radio (VPRO in The Netherlands). Originally produced in Dutch, her English language version of Senza Parole has attracted attention at both the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2014), USA and the Sheffield Doc/Fest (2014) in Britain.

In Senza …

Still Glowing Strong: Review 2 (Australia), Maree Delofski

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is an elegant and poetic documentary about a dreamer. Harald Brobakkan has an obsessive desire to create an everlasting battery. From the outset, the minimalist music and Leganger’s beautifully written narration set up the tone of the documentary – gentle, respectful, restrained, occasionally melancholic yet never maudlin. Program maker Sindre Leganger very successfully conveys Harald’s story together with rich observations about the universe, science and its treatment of ‘outsiders’, life - and the nature of a very long relationship.

Still Glowing Strong: Review (Denmark), Anna Elisabeth Jessen

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is Norwegian Sindre Leganger’s tender story of an old man, Harald, who thinks he has invented an everlasting battery that could save the world. The problem is that no one has the time to look at it – his wife in particular. But as Leganger and the old man’s grandson take an interest, this short but remarkable feature reveals much about our finite lives and the eternal starry sky above us, about being stubborn, being optimistic and about hope. Leganger illustrates Zola’s dictum, that “art is a corner of reality seen through a temperament”. He plays three …

Editorial Overview, Volume 2, Issue 1, Siobhan A. Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Overview of the nine audio features critiqued by Guest Reviewers, who are themselves eminent producers and curators of audio features. The works reviewed are from the US, UK, Canada, France, Poland and Denmark.

Not Quite Cricket By Jon Rose: A Review, Jane Ulman

RadioDoc Review

In Not Quite Cricket, Jon Rose reaches into the well-known story of the first Australian cricket team to play at Lords and draws out a tragedy dressed up as music hall comedy, in what he calls a 'historical intervention'.

Rose is an Australian-based polymath creator: a musician, inventor, composer, improviser, educator and entertainer. Radio production is just one strand of his prolific body of work. Over decades he has forged an innovative style, a distinctive radio form. His work has always been a fusion of genres, a hybrid of fact and invention with composed and improvised music carrying its …

Golden Boy - Zĺoty Chĺopak: A Review, Anna Sekudewicz

RadioDoc Review

This feature is a story woven from the lives of two people: Abraham, the son of a tailor from Łódź, and Kasia Michalak, who’s also from Łódź and whose grandfather was a tailor. How do you present Abraham Tuszyński without pigeon-holing his story as yet another tragic Holocaust narrative – particularly since the programme-maker wanted to avoid making a strictly historical feature? Where and how to find excitement, tension, heat and feelings in material that is by nature informational, objective, cold and factual? Despite posing a huge risk, the collision of the two stories, or realities, creates a new perspective, …

Little War On The Prairie: An Auto-Critique, John Biewen

RadioDoc Review

Using RadioDoc Review’s suggested criteria for evaluating a radio documentary, John Biewen delivers an auto-critique of his own program, Little War on the Prairie. It tells the story of the U.S.-Dakota War, a bloody Plains Indian war that broke out in the summer of 1862 in southern Minnesota. That six-week conflict took the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a larger death toll than in the better-known bloodlettings at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. Most of the dead were white settlers, though the U.S. government’s reprisals in the aftermath of the war killed up to several …

Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel: A Review, Sarah Geis

RadioDoc Review

Although producer Pejk Malinowski is originally from Denmark, and Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel is a project of London-based Falling Tree Productions, its premise seems cringingly American: our narrator goes to a self-help class, has an encounter with a celebrity. Which is to say, the risk of self-indulgence is high. To make it worse: the documentary takes place almost entirely within Malinovski’s mind. But these factors make it only more astonishing to hear how – through his singular voice, playful sense of humour, and impeccable sound design – Malinovski tells a story that makes the listener laugh, feel, and consider …

Rien Que Les Os: Version Française., Irène Omélianenko

RadioDoc Review

Critique d'un documentaire de création conçue par l'artiste Française Floy Krouchi à Radio France en équipe avec la réalisatrice Nathalie Battus et le chef opérateur du son Bruno Mourlan (2010).

Nothing But Bones (Rien Que Les Os): A Review, Irène Omélianenko

RadioDoc Review

This documentary by the French artist Floy Krouchi in collaboration with Nathalie Battus and Bruno Mourlan from Radio France is a hybrid piece that lies between music and poetic creation. It attempts to make a radiophonic connection between the mythic memory of the indigenous peoples of India and what remains today in certain pieces of music, in (people’s) memory, in singing and translation. The project began five years ago (2010) in Southern India where Floy Krouchi was then travelling. There she heard a short piece of music taken from a very ancient tradition that struck her as so strange and …